Tamara Keith

Tamara Keith is a NPR White House Correspondent. She is especially focused on matters related to the economy and the Federal budget.

Prior to moving into her current role in January 2014, she was a Congressional Correspondent covering Congress with an emphasis on the budget, taxes and the ongoing fiscal fights. During the Republican presidential primaries she covered Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich in South Carolina, and traveled with Mitt Romney leading into the primaries in Colorado and Ohio, among other states. She began covering congress in August 2011.

Keith joined NPR in 2009 as a Business Reporter. In that role, she reported on topics spanning the business world from covering the debt downgrade and debt ceiling crisis to the latest in policy debates, legal issues and technology trends. In early 2010, she was on the ground in Haiti covering the aftermath of the country's disastrous earthquake and later she covered the oil spill in the Gulf. In 2011, Keith conceived and reported the 2011 NPR series The Road Back To Work, a year-long series featuring the audio diaries of six people in St. Louis who began the year unemployed and searching for work.

Keith has deep roots in public radio and got her start in news by writing and voicing essays for NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday as a teenager. While in college, she launched her career at NPR Member Station KQED's California Report, covering topics including agriculture and the environment. In 2004, Keith began working at NPR Member Station WOSU in Columbus, Ohio, where she reported on politics and the 2004 presidential campaign.

Keith went back to California to open the state capital bureau for NPR Member Station KPCC/Southern California Public Radio. In 2006, Keith returned to KQED, serving as the Sacramento-region reporter for two years.

In 2001, Keith began working on B-Side Radio, an hour-long public radio show and podcast that she co-founded, produced, hosted, edited, and distributed for nine years.

Over the course of her career Keith has been the recipient of numerous accolades, including an award for best news writing from the APTRA California/Nevada and a first place trophy from the Society of Environmental Journalists for "Outstanding Story Radio." Keith was a 2010-2011 National Press Foundation Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow.

Keith earned a bachelor's degree in Philosophy from University of California, Berkeley, and a master's degree at the UCB Graduate School of Journalism. Tamara is also a member of the Bad News Babes, a media softball team that once a year competes against female members of Congress in the Congressional Women's Softball game.

California wasn't supposed to be close. In early polling, Hillary Clinton had a commanding lead, but that lead has all but vanished. A new survey from the Public Policy Institute of California has Clinton in a virtual tie with Bernie Sanders among Democratic primary likely voters — 46 percent support Clinton while 44 percent support Sanders.

If you've been following the Democratic presidential contest, you might be wondering how it is possible that Bernie Sanders seems to have all the energy and enthusiasm and, yet, Hillary Clinton is way ahead in the race to the nomination.

If you only considered crowd size at rallies for Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, you might wonder how Clinton has won so many big states. Sanders draws massive, enthusiastic crowds, while Clinton's rallies often seem tiny and subdued by comparison.

Monday night, the eve of five East Coast primaries taking place today, Sanders spoke to an overflow crowd — 3,200 people in total — at Drexel University in Philadelphia. His audience was more than double the crowd that showed up to hear Hillary Clinton speak at Philadelphia's city hall.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is waging a campaign at a turning point. The New York primary earlier this week was essentially a must win. And he lost.

He's still campaigning as hard as ever, hopping from state to state talking about a rigged economy and a political system ruled by millionaires and billionaires. But the candidate who started out as an underdog and rose to heights few expected has a math problem.

Sanders needs to win all the remaining contests by a 20-point margin to catch up to Hillary Clinton in pledged delegates.

To Bernie Sanders supporters, the idea that Democratic superdelegates — elected officials and other party elites who can vote however they wish at the convention — could tip the nomination to Hillary Clinton seems terribly undemocratic.

And so, they're trying to convince superdelegates, officially known as unpledged party leaders and elected officials, to change their allegiance.

When Bernie Sanders took the stage Sunday night in Madison, Wis., the crowd of about 5,000 went wild. One of the biggest applause lines came when Sanders talked about his campaign taking on the establishment.

"These guys may have unlimited sums of money," the Vermont senator said. "They may control the media, they may control the economy, they may control the political system. But when millions of people stand up together united and demand change, we will not be stopped."

Bernie Sanders and his supporters don't consider moving Hillary Clinton to the left a goal or even really a victory of any kind. They want to change America, not the stated positions of another candidate. And while he may not be beating her in the delegate race at the moment, there's an argument that Sanders has already won by getting the issues he cares about into the political blood stream.

There's an audio clip circulating on the Internet of Hillary Clinton talking about being proud of her time as a "Goldwater Girl" in 1964. It turns out to be an incomplete and selective excerpt of a lengthy — and still compelling (all these years later) — interview Clinton did in 1996 with Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon.

If you want to understand Clinton's Super Tuesday strategy all you need to do is look at her travel schedule: Georgia, Arkansas, Tennessee and Monday in Massachusetts and Virginia.

In these states she's delivering a relatively new, more positive message. There's less drawing contrasts with her primary opponent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and more talk of "breaking down barriers" and "love and kindness."